Friday, March 31, 2006

Its really surprising that even the "top trade officials" make mistakes in their statements to reporters. Economic times dated 29th Match 2006, on page 18th in the left-most corner reads as follows:INDIA and Pakistan agreed on Tuesday to jointly patent a popular variety of aromatic basmati rice, top trade officials said.

Even a novice in intelluctual properties like me can disregard this statement. The very first criteria of getting a patent is that the concept should be novel and something that is not known before. How can a popular variety of something can get a patent when its already in the public domain.

For those who don't know much about all this, just a note on patents: To get a patent you just need three things:

Novelty

Inventive step

Utility

Its not that I read the whole of ET and find out all the mistakes done and make bread-n-butter out of it. This issue was discussed in my IPR lecture. Now the prof asked us to write to the ET officials spotting the error. While he was asking I was thinking is it really worth writing to them and wasting so much of my precious time (which I could utilize in watching movies like Mr. 100% :P). No seriously even few days back when there was some reservation news ET made a headline of nothing. The leading newspaper proudly published that IITs and IIMs might have 49.something % seats reservered. To the best of my knowledge this move of government was for state-level-colleges and not the IIs. Anyways its not new for press to manipulate stories.

All is well that ends well. I still read ET :). I once thought I would discontinue the newspaper. But the morning I was about to do that, it had a headline of deal between two companies worth some few thousand crores (something around 4000 ). Now how can there be a better start of the day? The time when I don't know why I'm leaving Nandita Das lonely in the bed, when I oftenly switch off my ceiling fan thinking that it must be tired , if for just Rs 2.50 you tell me "good morning" in such good words I don't mind.

Be it manipulated, be it absolutely wrong who cares. If I'm really concerned I'll go to net and check myself, after I figure out that there is no such Nandita Das exists and Crompton Greaves is a good company to make a ceiling fan rotate whole night without getting tired :)

One of my wingmates was sitting besides me and asked me to go to the URL aai-to-aai-dot-com (this is how he pronounced and any other indian would do). With all the common sense in the world and with the most powerful tool on earth (popularly known as Google) I was unable to get to this URL. I tried the following links:i2i.comeye2eye.com(2 replaced with to and two and other permutation combination).

[Request: Before reading ahead please try it yourself. Coffee assured for the right guess :) ]

Being a maths student I always thought its stupid to try all the p&c's and being a computer science student I know a term heruistic :).

OK coming back to the point, the site which we wanted to visit was "i2eye.com" which we found out after browsing through the wingmates browsers history.

In the evening when I tried this exercise with few of my friends (who on an average browses the net at least 4-5 hours a day) ...the same result. Not a single person was able to get to the right URL.

This site can never get what we "kota-packaged" known as "mouth publicity".

Girls hate when I draw conclusions as they say I'm very bad at it but this time I would say please do this simple exercise before you book another web-address :)